squid-cache/squid

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3071 stars · 657 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Squid is a mature, full-featured caching web proxy supporting HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP, with extensive access controls, content adaptation via ICAP/eCAP, and logging. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web content, and can run as a forward proxy, reverse proxy, or server accelerator.

Use cases

• cache web traffic to save bandwidth on a corporate or ISP network
• set up a forward proxy with access control and authentication for users
• run a reverse proxy to accelerate and load balance a website
• filter and monitor employee web browsing
• cache Windows or OS updates locally to reduce internet usage
• build cache hierarchies to optimize network throughput
• intercept and inspect HTTPS traffic on a network

When to choose

• you need a battle-tested, high-performance caching proxy with rich ACLs
• you want to reduce bandwidth costs or speed up content delivery for many clients
• you need content adaptation, interception caching, or proxy authentication
• you want a self-hosted proxy that runs on nearly any OS

When to avoid

• you need a modern programmable edge proxy or API gateway (consider Envoy, NGINX, or HAProxy)
• you only need simple TLS termination or load balancing without caching
• you need HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 proxying, which Squid's HTTP/1.x proxy core does not fully support

Facets

application · maturity stable

proxy caching http-server middleware logging auth authorization rate-limiting networking web-development security performance self-hosted windows bsd cross-platform self-hosted web-proxy forward-proxy reverse-proxy http-cache content-filtering bandwidth-optimization icap ecap ssl-bump access-control linux macos web-server

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="squid-cache/squid")